Adtech outfit IPONWEB has appointed Jana Jakovljevic as vice president of business development for North America to help bolster its growth in the region by better accommodating publisher demand.

Jana Jakovljevic, was instrumental in the formation and roll out of Spotify’s programmatic offering
Jakovljevic will focus on developing strategic new relationships with publishers and help promote IPONWEB’s platform-related businesses, operating out of the company’s New York office and reporting to Joseph Meehan, IPONWEB’s general manager for North America.

Jakovljevic brings with her over 15 year’s experience in the digital media space, most recently working at Spotify where she was the music streaming service’s first head of programmatic, and helped launch its private marketplace offering in 2015. She was also among the judges at The Drum’s first-ever Digital Trading Awards in the US, and has held roles at fellow adtech outfit Rubicon Project where she headed up its Buyer Cloud offering in Northern Europe, as well as MySpace.

IPONWEB’s Meehan said her appointment was in response to an increasing amount of requests from publishers to better help them with their businesses, especially with multichannel monetization, and that Jakovljevic’s relationships and expertise would better position the company to do so.

Commenting on her decision to join IPONWEB, Jakovljevic added: “As media consumption continues to shift rapidly to more devices and platforms, the technological demands of publishers and media owners to provide automated advertising solutions becomes increasingly more complex and nuanced.

“No company is better poised to tackle these challenges and deliver sellers greater control of their media monetization strategy than IPONWEB.”

Headquartered in the UK, adtech outfit IPONWEB dates back to 2001 where it was cofounded by its chief executive officer and chief data scientist Dr Boris Mouzykantskii. He is a man often referred to as one of “the Godfather’s of adtech”, and often credited with envisioning potential problems in the adtech sector far in advance of many others.

For instance, as far back as three years ago Mouzykantskii was publicly warning publishers over the perils of data leakage to third parties, advocating that the media industry adopts similar methods employed by the financial services sector to combat such issues.

With operations in Berlin, California, London, Moscow, New York and Singapore, IPONWEB has a myriad off offerings to both the buy- and sell-side of the media business. These include: U-Platform, an offering that helps clients with better decisioning in real-time bidding environments; as well as BidSwitch which it claims helps integrate different adtech platforms to aid more efficient and transparent trading processes.